Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses for free to the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. Wikipedia is one of the notable web-based projects using one of its licenses.

The organization was founded in 2001 with the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain, however first set of copyright licenses were released in December 2002.

Aim and influence

Creative Commons has been described as being at the forefront of the copyleft movement, which seeks to support the building of a richer public domain by providing an alternative to the automatic "all rights reserved" copyright, dubbed "some rights reserved." David Berry and Giles Moss have credited Creative Commons with generating interest in the issue of intellectual property and contributing to the re-thinking of the role of the "commons" in the "information age". Beyond that, Creative Commons has provided "institutional, practical and legal support for individuals and groups wishing to experiment and communicate with culture more freely."

Creative Commons works to counter what the organization considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture. According to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, it is "a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past". Lessig maintains that modern culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions.

Governance

The current CEO of Creative Commons is Joi Ito. Mike Linksvayer is Vice President, John Wilbanks is Vice President of Science, and Ahrash Bissell is the Executive Director of ccLearn.

Board

The current Creative Commons Board include: Hal Abelson, Glenn Otis Brown, Michael W. Carroll, Caterina Fake, Davis Guggenheim, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, Laurie Racine, Eric Saltzman, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Jimmy Wales, and Esther Wojcicki (Chair).

Technical Advisory Board

The Technical Advisory Board includes five members: Hal Abelson, Ben Adida, Barbara Fox, Don McGovern and Eric Miller. Hal Abelson also serves on the Creative Commons Board.

Audit Committee

Creative Commons also has an Audit Committee, with two members: Molly Shaffer Van Houweling and Lawrence Lessig. Both serve on the Creative Commons Board.

Types of Creative Commons licenses

There are six major licenses of the Creative Commons:

• Attribution (CC-BY)
• Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA)
• Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND)
• Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC)
• Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA)
• Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)

There are four major conditions of the Creative Commons: Attribution (BY), requiring attribution to the original author; Share Alike (SA), allowing derivative works under the same or a similar license (later or jurisdiction version); Non-Commercial (NC), requiring the work is not used for commercial purposes; and No Derivative Works (ND), allowing only the original work, with out derivatives.

As of the current versions, all Creative Commons licenses allow the "core right" to redistribute a work for non-commercial purposes without modification. The NC and ND options will make a work non-free.

Additional options include the CC0 option, or "No Right Reserved." For software, Creative Commons has three available licenses: the BSD License, the CC GNU LGPL license, and the CC GNU GPL.

Usage of Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons is maintaining a content directory wiki of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses. On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world. CC licensed content can also be accessed through a number of content directories and search engines (see CC licensed content directories).

On January 13, 2009, some broadcasting content from Al Jazeera on the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict was released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Creative Commons International

The original non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with the U.S. legal system in mind, so the wording could be incompatible within different local legislations and render the licenses unenforceable in various jurisdictions. To address this issue, Creative Commons International has started to port the various licenses to accommodate local copyright and private law. As of December 2008, there are 50 jurisdiction-specific licenses, with 8 other jurisdictions in drafting process, and more countries joining the worldwide project.

Criticism

General Criticism

Péter Benjamin Tóth asserts that CC’s objectives are already well-served by the current copyright regime, and that CC’s “some rights reserved” slogan, as against Copyright’s “all rights reserved”, creates a false dichotomy. “Copyright provides a list of exclusive rights to the rightholder, from which he decides which ones he wishes to "sell" or grant and which to retain. The ‘Some rights reserved’ concept is therefore not an alternative to, but rather the very nature of classical copyright.” Other critics fear that Creative Commons could erode the copyright system over time.

Some of Creative Commons’ critics support revision of the copyright act, but believe CC to be merely a contractual quick fix which dissuades the public from mobilizing towards a real revision of the Copyright Act and copyright term lengths. Others, such as Jeffrey Harrison, believe the Creative Commons system to be too lax, and caution against “allowing some of our most precious resources--the creativity of individuals--to be simply tossed into the commons to be exploited by whomever has spare time and a magic marker."

Other critics question whether Creative Commons licenses are truly useful for artists, suggesting that CC is directed mainly toward a “remix culture” that is too much of the times and fails to account for the real needs of fine artists, especially in the visual arts world.

License Proliferation and Incompatibility

Critics have also argued that Creative Commons worsens license proliferation, by providing multiple licenses that are incompatible. The Creative Commons website states, “Since each of the six CC licenses functions differently, resources placed under different licenses may not necessarily be combined with one another without violating the license terms.” Works licensed under incompatible licenses may not be recombined in a derivative work without obtaining permission from the license-holder. Some worry that "without a common legal framework, works which inadvertently mix licenses may become unshareable."

License Misuse

Some copyright holders have complained that internet users erroneously brand their copyrighted works with Creative Commons licenses, and re-upload the works to the internet. Critics assert that this stems from rampant user-confusion about the licenses. At present, there are no checks in place to hold users accountable for mislicensing.

The Free Software Foundation

Some Creative Commons licenses do not meet the standards of the Free Software Foundation and other free content organizations. Specifically, the Creative Commons NC license has been denounced by FSM founder Richard Stallman because, he says, it denies users a “basic freedom” to reuse materials as they see fit.

Mako Hill asserts that Creative Commons fails to establish a “base level of freedom” that all Creative Commons licenses must meet, and with which all licensors and users must comply. “By failing to take any firm ethical position and draw any line in the sand, CC is a missed opportunity.... CC has replaced what could have been a call for a world where ‘essential rights are unreservable’ with the relatively hollow call for ‘some rights reserved.’” Some critics fear that Creative Commons' popularity may detract from the more stringent goals of other free content organizations.

Other Criticisms of the Non-Commercial License

Other critics, such as Erik Moller, raise concerns about the use of CC’s non-commercial license. Works distributed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license are not compatible with many open-content sites, including wikipedia, which explicitly allow and encourage some commercial uses. Moller explains that “the people who are likely to be hurt by an -NC license are not large corporations, but small publications like weblogs, advertising-funded radiostations, or local newspapers.”

Debian

The maintainers of Debian, a GNU and Linux distribution known for its rigid adherence to a particular definition of software freedom, do not believe that even the Creative Commons Attribution License, the least restrictive of the licenses, adheres to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) due to the license's anti-DRM provisions (which could restrict private redistribution to some extent) and its requirement in section 4a that downstream users remove an author's credit upon request from the author.

As the other licenses are identical to the Creative Commons Attribution License with further restrictions, Debian considers them non-free for the same reasons. There have been efforts to remove these problems in the new version 3.0 licenses, so they can be compatible with the DFSG. In contrast to the CC-SA 2.0 license, version 3.0 is considered to be compatible to the DFSG.

Legal Cases

Dutch Tabloid

A Creative Commons license was first tested in court in early 2006, when podcaster Adam Curry sued a Dutch tabloid who published photos without permission from his Flickr page. The photos were licensed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. While the verdict was in favour of Curry, the tabloid avoided having to pay restitution to him as long as they did not repeat the offense. An analysis of the decision states, "The Dutch Court’s decision is especially noteworthy because it confirms that the conditions of a Creative Commons license automatically apply to the content licensed under it, and bind users of such content even without expressly agreeing to, or having knowledge of, the conditions of the license."

Virgin Mobile

In 2007, Virgin Mobile launched a bus stop ad campaign promoting their cellphone text messaging service using the work of amateur photographers who uploaded their work to Flickr using a Creative Commons-by (Attribution) license. Users licensing their images this way freed their work for use by any other entity, as long as the original creator was attributed credit, without any other compensation required. Virgin upheld this single restriction by printing a URL leading to the photographer's Flickr page on each of their ads. However, one picture, depicting 15 year-old Alison Chang at a fund-raising carwash for her church, caused some controversy when she sued Virgin Mobile. The photo was taken by Alison's church youth counselor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who uploaded the image to Flickr under the Creative Commons license. In 2008, the case was thrown out of court for lack of jurisdiction meaning Virgin Mobile were not liable for any accountability or subsequent damages.

CC-Music - Spanish Court (2006)

The issue in this case was not whether the CC license was enforceable, but instead whether the major collecting society in Spain could collect royalties from a bar that played CC-licensed music.

List of projects that release contents under Creative Commons licenses

• Wikipedia (cc-by-sa, since June 2009)
• Wikia (cc-by-sa, since June 2009)
• Citizendium (cc-by-sa)
• knol (mostly, cc-by-sa or cc-by-nc-sa)
• Arduino (cc-by-sa)
• Qi Hardware (cc-by-sa)

See also

• Creative Commons licenses
• Copyright
• Copyleft
• Free content
• List of works available under a Creative Commons License
• Open content
• Open source
• Public domain
• Share-alike
• CC PDF Converter

Citations

1. (Creative Commons FAQ)
2. Berry & Moss 2005
3. Creative Commons Case Studies
4. project
5. http://blog.internetcases.com/2009/01/22/no-personal-jurisdiction-over-australian-defendant-in-flickr-right-of-publicity-case/
6. http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5830

References